Reimagining the Émigrés and Postwar Transcending the Atlantic

Introduction Transatlantic World America World

RETHINKING TRANSATLANTIC RELATIONS IN THE FIRST

COLD WAR DECADES

Mary Nolan

In 1941 prominent American magazine publisher Henry Luce pro-

claimed his hopes for an “American internationalism,” led by his fel-
low countrymen who would “accept wholeheartedly our duty and our
opportunity . . . to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence,
for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”1 His
call for an “American Century” found ready resonance among U.S.
politicians, pundits, and intellectuals, who during and after the war
sought to revamp transatlantic and global economic, political, military,
and cultural relations. If ever this sweeping vision was realized, it was
in the first post-World War II decades, above all but not exclusively in
Western Europe. America’s mid-century dominance there rested on its
economic prowess and model of Fordist modernity; on unchallenged
military might, conventional and nuclear; and on a pervasive trans-
atlantic consensus, at least among elites, about anti-Communism
and containment but also about Keynesiansim and generous social
policies. It was also supported by Western Europeans’ admiration for
American political values and popular culture and their willingness
to be junior partners in America’s “empire by invitation.”2 The final
prerequisite for America’s extraordinary influence was the relative
weakness not only of its transatlantic Allies but also of its Soviet
enemy, who had suffered such enormous losses in World War II.

The American Century was, however, neither as long-lived as its

name implied, nor as hegemonic as its proponents imagined, even
in the first Cold War decades. America’s preponderance of power
in transatlantic relations must be recognized, but simultaneously,
arguments about Americanization need to be complicated, other
circuits of exchange of ideas, products, and people acknowledged,
1 Henry Luce, “The Ameri-
and the Atlantic Community recontextualized in terms of its two can Century,” Life, Feb. 7,
“others” — the socialist Second World and the Third World. This 1941. Italics in original.

essay will suggest some of the ways this can be done. First, it will 2 Mary Nolan, The Trans-
situate the exceptional years from 1945 until the early 1970s in a atlantic Century: Europe
and America, 1890-2010
history of transatlantic relations over the long twentieth century. (Cambridge, UK, 2012), 3;
Geir Lundestad, “Empire
Second, it will illustrate the limits of Americanization in Western
by Invitation? The United
Europe, note some of the cooperative projects and ongoing conflicts States and Western Europe,
1945-1952,” Journal of
that suggest mutual dependencies and two-way exchanges, and Peace Research 23, no. 3
highlight some European influences on postwar America in addition (Sept. 1986): 263-77.

NOLAN | RETHINKING 19

3 Jeffry Frieden, Global Capi-
talism: Its Fall and Rise in the
Twentieth Century (Oxford,
2004), 13-80; Mona Domosh,
American Commodities in an
Age of Empire (New York,
2006); Nolan, Transatlantic
Century, 24-30; Daniel Rodgers,
Atlantic Crossings: Social Poli-
tics in a Progressive Age
(Cambridge, MA, 1998).
20 GHI BULLETIN SUPPLEMENT 10 (2014)
to those of the experts, professionals, and intellectuals who feature
in the subsequent essays. Third, the complex circuits of exchange
within Europe, including across the Iron Curtain, will illustrate the
multidirectionality of European interests and influences and warn
against an overemphasis on Atlantic crossings in whatever direction.
Finally, the importance of European and American global economic
aspirations and mental maps as well as of concrete interactions with
the Third World will not only help situate the transatlantic within the
global. They also show how central the colonial and Third Worlds
were to the politics, economics, and self-definition of those in the
Atlantic Community from the late nineteenth century on, even if
the exact nature of the relations and self-definitions changed over
the course of the long twentieth century.
Europe’s American Century
Sweeping narratives of the decline of the Old World and rise of the
New capture elements of the shifting relationship between Europe
and America in the twentieth century, but they do justice neither to
the complexity of the exchanges of goods, people, institutions, and
ideas in both directions across the Atlantic nor to the ambivalent
and contradictory attitudes of Europeans and Americans toward one
another. A history of shifting transatlantic power relations, of provi-
sional outcomes and ongoing indeterminacies, of cooperative projects
and competing visions of capitalism, modernity, and empire cannot
be reduced to the inevitable triumph of the United States; such a his-
tory is much more nuanced, contingent, and contradictory. It shows
the unique and transitory character of the post-1945 constellation of
transatlantic relations but also suggests continuities across periods.
In the multipolar decades before 1914, the economic, imperial, and intel-
lectual exchanges in both directions between Europe and the United
States were multiplying, but U.S. dominance was neither evident nor
viewed as inevitable. The United States was not a major imperial power;
it was not seen as a political or military model to imitate or fear. Although
American industrial production grew and its investments and goods
moved into Europe — think Singer sewing machines, International
Harvest reapers, and Kodak cameras — Britain remained the world’s
banker, insurer, and leading trader, and Germany was an industrial
rival. America was not yet viewed as an economic model to emulate.
And in the arena of social policy, as Dan Rodgers has shown, Ameri-
cans were the students and Europeans, often Germans, the teachers.3
 Reimagining the Émigrés and Postwar Transcending the Atlantic
Introduction Transatlantic World America World

To be sure, some worried about an “Americanization of the world,” to

quote the title of William Stead’s book, which was actually about U.S.
threats to the British Empire. Other Brits wrote of “American invad-
ers” and the “American threat.” German officials and industrialists,
however, were, overall, confident about their ability to compete eco-
nomically, and the French saw little danger. Many Europeans wrote
about the puzzling “American woman,” the peculiarities of gender
relations in the U.S., and lamented the lack of Kultur, but none feared
that these U.S. peculiarities might be imported into Europe.4 In short,
before 1914 there was an uncertain balance of power in transatlantic
relations and mutual interest but not obsessive preoccupation; nei-
ther anti-Americanism nor anti-Europeanism existed on a significant
scale. The American Century had not yet begun.

World War I and its economic and political repercussions changed all 4 W. T. Stead, The American-
ization of the World (New
that, paving the way — albeit in stops and starts — for the eclipse of York and London, 1902);
European hegemony and the rise of an interventionist America. Only Fred McKenzie, The Amer-
ican Invaders (New York,
then did a significant transatlantic divide and the deep ambivalence 1976); Alexander Schmidt,
that has ever since characterized Europeans’ view of America and Reisen in die Moderne: Der
Amerika-Diskurs des deut-
Americans’ of Europe develop. World War I encouraged American schen Bürgertums vor dem
Ersten Weltkrieg im euro-
disdain for European militarism and led the United States to see itself
päischen Vergleich (Berlin,
as Europe’s savior, entitled to prescribe the terms of peace. These 1997).
contradictory assessments were to encourage both interventionism 5 Alan Dawley, Changing the
and isolationism in the interwar years. Britain and France needed World: American Progres-
sives in War and Revolution
American aid but resented the terms on which it was offered and (Princeton, 2003); Gerd
promoted a very different peace settlement than Wilson wanted. The Hardach, The First World
War, 1914-1918 (Berkeley,
war experience on each side of the Atlantic was radically different, 1977); N. Gordon Levin,
and these different experiences and memories of total war would Woodrow Wilson and
World Politics: America’s
complicate European-American relations throughout the twentieth Response to War and Revo-
century.5 lution (New York, 1968);
Margaret MacMillan, Paris
1919: Six Months that
The war’s economic aftermath set the stage for the 1920s. On the Changed the World (New
one hand, Europe was economically devastated, globally weakened, York, 2003).

and heavily indebted; on the other hand, the United States was pio- 6 Frank Costigliola, Awk-
neering a new form of mass production and consumption: Fordism. ward Dominion: Ameri-
can Political, Economic
Europe’s dramatically altered situation fueled a preoccupation with and Cultural Relations
with Europe, 1919-1933
America, one that was greatest in Germany and the Soviet Union but
(Ithaca, NY, 1984); Charles
present everywhere. It took varied forms, ranging from enthusiasm to S. Maier, “Between Tay-
lorism and Technocracy:
abhorrence. For its part, the United States alternated between isola- European Ideologies and
tionism and unilateralism; economic engagement via loans, exports, Visions of Productivity in
the 1920s,” Journal of Con-
and investments, and political distancing from individual countries temporary History 5, no. 2
and new international institutions, the League of Nations above all.6 (April 1970): 27-61.

NOLAN | RETHINKING 21

7 Wolfgang Schivelbusch,
Three New Deals: Reflec-
tions on Roosevelt’s America,
Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s
Germany (New York, 2006);
Philipp Gassert, Amerika im
Dritten Reich: Ideologie, Pro-
paganda und Volksmeinung
1933-1945 (Stuttgart, 1997);
Alan M. Ball, Imagining Ame-
rica: Influence and Images in
Twentieth-Century Russia
(Lanham, MD, 2003); Kendall
E. Bailes, “The American
Connection: Ideology and the
Transfer of American Tech-
nology to the Soviet Union,
1917-1941,” Comparative
Studies in Society and History
23, no. 3 (July 1981): 421-48.
8 The phrase, which echoed
through U.S. foreign policy
debates in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, is
from George Washington’s
farewell address.
22 GHI BULLETIN SUPPLEMENT 10 (2014)
The allure of America as the land of unrivaled prosperity, unlimited
growth, and unequivocal modernity dissipated during the 1930s,
as the Depression devastated both sides of the Atlantic. The global
economy became disarticulated, and transatlantic political divisions
multiplied. The United States with its mass unemployment and
escalating class conflicts seemed to be becoming Europeanized.
Yet, the attraction of America did not disappear completely. Despite
rhetorical condemnation of economic Americanism in Nazi Germany
and Fascist Italy and growing critiques of American popular culture
there and in the Soviet Union, Germany, Italy, and especially the
Soviet Union borrowed elements of the Fordist model of production
but not its accompanying stress on consumption. They shared with
the United States (and Sweden) more interventionist approaches
to the Depression such as labor services and a penchant for giant
infrastructure projects. To be sure, different countries harnessed
these economic and social policies for quite different political ends.7
Those countries closest to the United States politically and cultur-
ally, Britain and France, were more reluctant to adopt such economic
and social measures. Political divisions, ideological cleavages, and
economic visions thus seemed at once sharper and more blurred, as
the transatlantic world moved haltingly toward a post-liberal order
whose contours were contested and uncertain. As would be the case
post-1945, the European adoption of things American was selective.
Things borrowed were transformed, often beyond recognition when
put in different national contexts, and Europe was far from being
Americanized. When Henry Luce published his famous “American
Century” essay, it was less a description of America’s role in Europe
and the world than a plea for Americans to take up a global mission.
World War II dramatically changed the transatlantic balance of
power, devastating Europe economically, disrupting it socially, and
discrediting elites and parties in many countries politically and
culturally. It brought the United States and the USSR closer than
at any time in the long twentieth century. Then the onset of the
Cold War, for which both superpowers were responsible, ended the
wartime community of interests and led Western Europeans and
Americans to define the emerging Atlantic Community as separate
from and opposed to the Soviet bloc. War and preparations for peace
ended American ambivalence about “entangling alliances”8 and
belief in isolationism. From the late 1940s to the early 1970s, the
United States reshaped the global economic order, helped restructure
political regimes across Western Europe, and experimented with
 Reimagining the Émigrés and Postwar Transcending the Atlantic
Introduction Transatlantic World America World

both containment and rollback toward the Soviet bloc.9 American

businessmen, soldiers, and aid officials, American commodities,
movies, music, and high culture flooded into Europe. Never had the
American presence and influence been greater.

Even at the highpoint of America’s preponderance of power, however,

there were significant tensions between the United States and its
Western European allies over welfare and warfare, nuclear weapons
9 Melvyn P. Leffler, For the
and economic policies, attitudes toward the Soviet bloc and relations Soul of Mankind: The United
States, the Soviet Union
with the Third World. France replaced Britain and Germany as the
and the Cold War (New
country where ambivalence about American power and products was York, 2007). For a differ-
ent interpretation of the
greatest. Europeans engaged in complex negotiations with American origins of the Cold War,
ideas, cultural products, and commodities and created hybrid forms see John Lewis Gaddis
We Now Know: Rethinking
of mass culture and modern living. Within European countries, Cold War History (Oxford,
between East and West, and among members of the Atlantic Com- 1997). For recent scholar-
ship on the transatlantic
munity, culture wars were fought, both about American movies, Cold War and its global
music, and commodities in Europe and about whether and how poli- counterpart, see Cam-
bridge History of the Cold
tics and states should instrumentalize culture for Cold War ends.10 War, vol. 1, Origins, ed.
Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd
From the 1970s onward, American influence began to erode.11 The Arne Westad (Cambridge,
UK, 2010).
protest movements of the late 1960s challenged both American
hegemony and the Cold War categories central to it, and growing 10 Nolan, Transatlantic
Century, 191-266;
antinuclear movements further contested U.S. leadership. The Richard Kuisel, Seducing
the French: The Dilemma of
multiple economic crises of the 1970s — the gold drain, oil shocks,
Americanization (Berkeley,
and the exhaustion of Fordism — weakened America’s domination 1993); Scott Lucas,
Freedom’s War: The Amer-
of the global economy. Détente as practiced by the United States ican Crusade against the
and the USSR, on the one hand, and European states, on the other, Soviet Union (New York,
1999).
took different forms that reflected Western Europe’s increasing
autonomy. In the 1980s the United States and much of Europe grew 11 See David Ellwood, Shock
of America: Europe and
still farther apart, as America, along with Britain, embraced neo- the Challenge of the Cen-
liberalism, while continental European states defended important tury (Oxford, 2012), for an
argument about the con-
parts of their social democratic social policies and their particular tinuing influence of Amer-
varieties of more regulated capitalism, even as they liberalized the ica in Europe.

financial sector.12 12 Frieden, Global Capitalism,

339-411; Angela Romano,
For many Americans the fall of Communism represented the longed From Détente in Europe to
European Détente (Brussels,
for American Cold War victory, the end of a troubled history of 2009); Jeremy Suri,
challenges to liberalism and capitalism, and the beginning of U.S. Power and Protest: Global
Revolution and the Rise of
unilateral global dominance. For Europeans the series of events Détente (Cambridge, MA,
2003).
for which 1989 is shorthand were more complex; far from ending
history, they opened a new era in which Europe had to redefine its 13 Ivan T. Berend. Europe
Since 1980 (Cambridge,
identity and institutions and in which Europeans borrowed more UK, 2010); Nolan, Trans-
from one another than from America.13 As America turned away from atlantic Century, 332-55.

NOLAN | RETHINKING 23

14 See Weisbrode’s essay in this
collection for a different view
on the relationship of the
Atlantic Community to
globalization.
15 Charles Maier, “The Politics
of Productivity: Foundations
of American International
Economic Policy after World
War II,” in In Search of Stabil-
ity: Explorations in Historical
Political Economy (Cambridge,
UK, 1987), 121-52.
24 GHI BULLETIN SUPPLEMENT 10 (2014)
Europe, Europe intensified its economic and political integration,
and European states frequently dissented from American global
projects, military and economic. Of equal importance, a multipolar
world has come into being; the North Atlantic no longer contains all
the key players, nor is it central to all exchanges and networks. The
transatlantic movement of ideas, goods, investments, and cultural
products in both directions will continue — and perhaps intensify
if the EU-U.S. free trade agreement is implemented — just as it has
over the long twentieth century, with now Europe and now America
dominating in different areas. Yet, the Atlantic Community, in so far
as it survives, is no longer the only or most important institutional
and imagined political, military, and economic supranational entity for
either Europeans or Americans.14
Limits of Americanization
In the years after 1945, American military personnel, businessmen,
Marshall Plan administrators, labor leaders, foundation officials, and
educators moved out across Western Europe to spread the gospel
of democratic capitalism and anti-communism. They encouraged
Europeans to adopt the “politics of productivity,” to open their mar-
kets, integrate their economies, and allow Hollywood films, jazz, and
rock ‘n’ roll to circulate freely. “You can be like us” was the Ameri-
can promise — one which many perceived as a threat.15 But did the
combination of aid and investment, multinationals and foundations,
consumer goods and cultural products — all varied forms of Ameri-
can soft and semi-hard power — transform European economies and
societies in the ways anticipated?
At issue are not American ambitions but rather Western Europe’s
openness to things American and its ability to adopt or adapt them.
While most scholars agree that concepts such as thoroughgoing
European emulation or American cultural imperialism are too crude
to describe the complex transatlantic interactions, there is much
room for disagreement about what postwar Americanization looked
like in different areas of economy and society, in different countries,
and for different generations and genders. Indeed, there is much dis-
agreement about how to define that elusive term. Some speak of the
transfer of the American model and partial convergence, while others
opt for cross-fertilization and American engagements or speak of
adaptation, negotiation, and the resulting creation of hybrid practices,
products, and policies. The essence of the American model is equally
 Reimagining the Émigrés and Postwar Transcending the Atlantic
Introduction Transatlantic World America World

open to dispute. For Victoria de Grazia, its core is American consumer

culture, with its distinctive Fordized system of distribution, its new
advertising techniques and messages, its democratic and egalitarian
ethos and consumer citizens, and its promise of a dramatically new
standard of living. For Charles Maier, the American model that was
exported post-1945 was ideological as much as institutional — a
politics of productivity that was promoted by mass production, orga-
nizational rationalization, new technology, an open international
economic order, and also promised not only growth but an escape
from the zero-sum distribution struggles and ideological politics of
earlier decades. For Marie-Laure Djelic the essence of the postwar
American model, a model that was historically specific but claimed
universal validity, was the large multidivisional, rationalized corpora-
tion, operating under the constraints of antitrust legislation and com-
peting in oligopolistic markets. Both Christian Kleinschmidt and the
authors in the collection edited by Jonathan Zeitlin and Gary Herrigel
reject the idea of a unitary American model embodying the best prac-
tices for productivity. Instead, they see the United States as having
offered an ensemble of organizational innovations, technologies, and
management and marketing practices among which Europeans could
pick and choose and which they could modify and recombine to suit
local institutions, needs, preferences, and prejudices.16

America’s influence varied across European countries, depending on

16 Victoria de Grazia, Irre-
the amount of U.S. aid and investment, the size of the U.S. military sistible Empire: America’s
presence, the strength of prior cultural ties and exchanges, and the Advance through Twentieth-
Century Europe (Cambridge,
depth of national resistance to imports from across the Atlantic. Ger- MA, 2005); Marie-Laure
many was among the most “Americanized” countries, for example; Djelic, Exporting the Amer-
ican Model: The Postwar
France among the least. That said, one can generalize about the Transformation of Euro-
kinds and degrees of Americanization in different areas of European pean Business (Oxford,
1998); Jonathan Zeitlin,
economic, political, and cultural life in the first Cold War decades. “Introduction,” in Ameri-
canization and Its Limits:
After 1945 American popular culture — jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, Hollywood Reworking U.S. Technology
and Management in Post-
films, Coca-Cola, and blue jeans — was enthusiastically embraced, war Europe and Japan, ed.
above all by European youth on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Among Jonathan Zeitlin and Gary
Herrigel (Oxford, 2000),
traditional elites, cultural figures, religious leaders, and politicians 1-51; Christian Klein-
in Christian Democratic and communist regimes, the presence of schmidt, Der produktive
Blick: Wahrnehmung ameri-
such cultural artifacts aroused great anxiety, for these quintessen- kanischer und japanisher
Management- und Pro-
tial symbols of American mass culture and consumption seemed to
duktionsmethoden durch
threaten established gender norms, generational hierarchies, reli- deutsche Unternehmer,
1950-1985 (Oldenbourg,
gious and political authority, and ostensibly self-contained national 2002); Maier, “Politics of
cultures. Yet, consumption did not necessarily indicate full-scale Productivity.”

NOLAN | RETHINKING 25
 Americanization. Going to Hollywood films, for example, did not
mean wanting to become American; it might be just a fun escape or
akin to a visit to a familiar foreign country. If postwar popular culture
began in America, it soon incorporated European influences. While
Elvis dominated rock in the 1950s, for example, the Beatles and
the Rolling Stones did so in the 1960s and 1970s. A European-led
international music scene emerged that was part of a transatlantic
youth culture. In the 1950s, the embrace of American popular culture
reflected and reinforced support for American political values and
practices; by the late 1960s European youth continued to consume
American mass culture, but many no longer endorsed American
policies in Europe or globally.17

Americans sought not only to sell their commodities and cultural

wares but also to impart their political values, pedagogy, and asso-
ciational forms. Learning about American history and contemporary
life was to be an integral part of the Americanization of Western
Europe. The U.S. government engaged in cultural diplomacy, seeking
to win hearts and minds with radio programming, tours by American
artists, and exhibits of art, technology, and kitchens. The officially
17 Martin Klimke, The Other
nongovernmental Congress for Cultural Freedom published journals
Alliance: Student Protest in
West Germany and the United and ran conferences to woo intellectuals away from any communist
States in the Global Sixties
(Princeton, 2010); Uta Poiger,
sympathies, while the Ford Foundation funded the Salzburg Seminars
Jazz, Rock and Rebels: Cold to teach American Studies to Europeans. The government brought
War Politics and American
Culture in a Divided Germany
thousands of West German businessmen, engineers, trade unionists,
(Berkeley, 2000); Reinhold and journalists to the U.S. for short study tours in the late 1940s and
Wagnleitner and Elaine Tyler
May, eds., Here, There and
1950s. Thereafter the vast Fulbright and IREX programs, as well as
Everywhere: The Foreign Politics private fellowships, brought a growing number of foreign students
of American Popular Culture
(Hanover, NH, 2000). to the United States — as well as sending thousands of Americans
abroad.18
18 Harm G. Schröter, American-
ization in the European Eco-
nomy: A Compact Survey of These efforts met with mixed success. The Congress for Cultural
American Economic Influences Freedom, for example, won many converts in the 1950s but lost
in Europe since the 1880s
(Dordrecht, 2005), 49-51; credibility in the 1960s when its ties to the CIA were exposed. Trade
Volker R. Berghahn, America unionists learned about the American model of business unionism
and the Intellectual Cold Wars
in Europe (Princeton, 2001); but never adopted it at home. American officials and foundations
Kenneth A. Osgood, “Hearts
argued that American art, music, and literature were as developed
and Minds: The Unconven-
tional Cold War,” Journal of as that of Europe, but many Europeans were more interested in
Cold War Studies 4, no. 2
(Spring 2002): 99; Francis
American popular culture and continued to believe that Kultur was
Stonor Saunders, The Cultural the distinctive preserve of Europe, while American prowess lay in
Cold War: The CIA and
the World of Arts and Letters
economics and technology. (Many Americans may well have agreed,
(New York, 2000). but that is a subject still in need of exploration.)

26 GHI BULLETIN SUPPLEMENT 10 (2014)

 Reimagining the Émigrés and Postwar Transcending the Atlantic
Introduction Transatlantic World America World

Educational exchanges have been assessed primarily in terms of

whether they made Western and later Eastern Europeans more
democratic and sympathetic to American interests.19 Two ques-
tions relevant to our theme remain unanswered. First, how did
those Europeans who studied in the United States in the 1950s and
1960s and returned to Europe, or who were European-educated
and then made their careers in the United States from the late
1960s onward, shape American scholarship as well as American
politics and culture? They were well positioned to build transatlan-
tic networks and, in the field I know best, history, to continue the
work of explaining Europe to Americans that the refugee genera-
tion began. Thomas Wheatland’s essay considers this generation,
and Merel Leeman writes about the younger generation that came
before the war.20 They were enormously influential in shaping the
field of European history, but European Americanists, such as Rob
Kroes or David Ellwood, have been largely ignored by historians
in the United States, who seem to feel American history can only
be written by Americans. Second, what did all those Americans
who studied and researched in Europe bring back to their work
and lives in the United States? How were they shaped by the intel-
lectual approaches, political milieus, and cultural practices they
encountered?

While Americans valued their cultural and educational initiatives,

they saw economic reconstruction, reform, and modernization as 19 See, for example, Yale
Richmond, Cultural
the prerequisite for a new Europe in a new Atlantic community. Exchange and the Cold
Fordism — a system of mass production and mass consumption of War: Raising the Iron Cur-
tain (University Park, PA,
consumer durables, built on integrated production, minutely divided 2003).
assembly-line work, high wages, and credit purchases — was,
20 See the Wheatland and
along with free trade, at the core of America’s economic mes- Leeman essays in this
sage. Europeans had first encountered Fordism in the interwar volume.

years through Henry Ford’s writings and trips to his River Rouge 21 Richard Kuisel, Capitalism
plant in Detroit. Reactions were mixed. Conservative elites, who and the State in Modern
France: Renovation and
deplored America’s gender relations, homogeneous, standardized Economic Management
products, and lack of Kultur, abhorred Fordism as did industrial- in the Twentieth Century
(Cambridge, UK, 1981);
ists and most politicians who insisted that mass consumption and Mary Nolan, Visions of
high wages were impossible in war-ravaged Europe. German Social Modernity: American Busi-
ness and the Modernization of
Democrats were willing to embrace the assembly line if it brought Germany (Oxford, 1994);
a higher standard of living, and Soviets saw socialist Fordism as Hans Rogger, “Ameri-
kanizm and Economic
a way to industrialize and modernize. Most Europeans, however, Development in Russia,”
Comparative Studies in
were ambivalent about Fordism, and none were able to emulate the
Society and History 23, no.
American economic model.21 2 (1981): 382-420.

NOLAN | RETHINKING 27
 After 1945, the United States sought to export Fordism and Taylorism
with its minute division of labor and close managerial supervision
of workers via the Marshall Plan and European Productivity Agency
and to promote European economic integration in order to create a
large American-style market. Those historians and social scientists
positing far-reaching Americanization look at the most advanced
industrial sectors like steel or autos, emphasize the growing pro-
duction and purchase of consumer durables, and note the adoption
of American corporate organization, advertising, and management
practices. Others see the persistence of varieties of capitalism and
emphasize the diversity of firms, production processes, and technolo-
gies in Western Europe. They point to distinctive labor relations,
worker training, and firm financing, and emphasize the prevalence of
corporatist bargaining among labor, capital, and the state in countries
such as Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, and Britain.22
Like blind people describing an elephant, these historians and social
scientists envision an utterly different beast, depending on which part
of the elephant — or the economy — they touch.

A reading of the literatures on both Americanization and varieties

22 For the German case, Volker
Berghahn, Americanization of of capitalism, however, enables some generalizations. “Selective
West German Industry, 1945-
adaptation, creative modification and innovative hybridization” most
1973 (Oxford, 1986) falls
into former camp; Werner accurately captures European developments, for although Western
Abelshauser, Kulturkampf:
Der deutsche Weg in die neue
European economies were significantly modified postwar, distinctive
Wirtschaft und die amerika- varieties of capitalism nonetheless persisted. 23 Europeans negotiated
nische Herausforderung (Berlin,
2003); and Gary Herrigel,
with American products, processes and practices, but they also drew
Industrial Constructions: The on their own traditions and visions of the future. Western Europeans
Sources of German Industrial
Power (Cambridge, 2000) into
accorded the state a much greater economic role than did Americans.
the latter. For an introduction After World War II they either lived with inherited nationalized
to the Varieties of Capital-
ism literature, see Varieties of industries, as in Italy, or nationalized key sectors of industry, finance
Capitalism: The Institutional and transport, as in Britain and France. Planning and state subsidies
Foundations of Comparative
Advantage, ed. Peter A. Hall were embraced. What Jan Logemann has argued for West Germany
and David Soskice (Oxford, holds more broadly: Europeans accorded much more importance
2001).
to public goods than did Americans, who prioritized private con-
23 Zeitlin, “Introduction,” 17-18. sumption at the expense of social and economic policy.24 Although
24 Jan L. Logemann, Trams or European growth rates were higher than those in the United States,
Tailfins? Public and Private the overall level of consumption was much lower, especially in the
Prosperity in Postwar West
Germany and the United 1950s. Western Europe began purchasing consumer durables —
States (Chicago, 2012), 4-11,
washing machines, refrigerators, TVs, and cars — on a massive scale
23-24.
at decade’s end, and Eastern Europe followed in the 1970s.25 But, as
25 For statistics on this rapid
increase, see Nolan, Trans-
the Swedish anthropologist Orvar Löfgren has perceptively noted,
atlantic Century, 261, 263. American visitors to Sweden found that the use of appliances, the

28 GHI BULLETIN SUPPLEMENT 10 (2014)

 Reimagining the Émigrés and Postwar Transcending the Atlantic
Introduction Transatlantic World America World

preferred color schemes of homes and offices, the shape of brooms,

even the smell of multinational disinfectant, was different. Everyday
modernity was at once American, international, and profoundly if
often elusively national.26

To be sure, the concept of Americanization cannot be dispensed with

entirely, when looking at production and consumption. It captures
the postwar power relations that made America the model against
which Western Europeans defined their economic practices, espe-
cially in the early postwar period. By the late 1960s, however, America
accounted for only 35 percent of global manufacturing and was failing
to improve productivity, while European nations regained competi-
tiveness and enjoyed unprecedented prosperity.27 They no longer felt
impelled to look to America. They were not only producing for their
own domestic markets and those of other European states; they were
exporting to the United States as well.

The late l960s and early 1970s marked the apogee of Americanization
because of Europe’s recovery and growing autonomy and because
of the multiple economic and political crises the United States suf-
fered in the 1970s. Of equal importance, the American model itself
changed. It came to stand for a post-Fordist, information-technology-
and finance-based economy, neoliberal economic policies, and an
ownership society that drastically curbed social rights and social
infrastructure. After the 1970s Western Europe did not make the
sharp neoliberal turn that the United States and Great Britain did.
The resulting market gap contributed to a widening of the Atlantic
and tensions within the Atlantic Community.

Joint Ventures and American Borrowings

European-American relations in the first postwar decades are often
written as a story of Western European immaturity and dependence
on the United States — for political tutelage; for military protection
via NATO, U.S. forces, and the American nuclear umbrella; and
for economic assistance via the Bretton Woods monetary system,
the Marshall Plan, investment, and technological education. That
certainly captures the first postwar decade, but even then America
believed it needed an open and prosperous Europe as a market for 26 Orvar Löfgren, “Material-
U.S. goods and investments. Other American dependencies followed. izing the Nation in Sweden
and America,” Ethnos 58,
Let’s take one example. The United States developed a balance-of- no. 3-4 (1993): 190.
payments problem in the 1950s as American imports from Europe
27 Schröter, Americaniza-
exceeded exports to the continent, stationing hundreds of thousands tion, 123.

NOLAN | RETHINKING 29

28 Francis J. Gavin, Gold, Dollars,
& Power: The Politics of Inter-
national Monetary Relations,
1958-1971 (Chapel Hill, NC,
2004); Diane B. Kunz, Butter
and Guns: America’s Cold
War Economic Diplomacy
(New York, 1997), 151.
29 Nolan, Transatlantic Century,
282-86, 289-93; Matthias
Schulz and Thomas A.
Schwartz, eds., The Strained
Alliance: United States-
European Relations from Nixon
to Carter (Cambridge, 2010).
30 GHI BULLETIN SUPPLEMENT 10 (2014)
of troops was costly, multinationals invested heavily, and tourists
spent freely. The resulting dollar drain put pressure on America’s
gold reserves, and the United States had to negotiate “offset” pay-
ments from West Germany to help cover military costs and beg both
France and Germany not to cash in their dollar holdings for gold.28
The exchangeability of currencies and tariff rates were also a constant
source of friction.
Americans expected Western Europeans to comply with American
wishes for freer trade or more military spending or protection of U.S.
gold reserves out of gratitude for all the United States had done for
Europe, even though they did not wish to share decision-making
power. In practice, there was an ongoing renegotiation of American
hegemony that made the relationship within the Atlantic Community
more equal and the interests of different partners more distinct. The
1971 American decision to abandon the Bretton Woods monetary
system, the 1973 oil crisis, and the end of the postwar boom created
bitter transatlantic conflicts and separate policy paths. Nonethe-
less, the creation of the G7 and the deliberations of the Trilateral
Commission, composed of businessmen, government officials, and
social scientists from the United States, Western Europe, and Japan
revealed ongoing efforts to keep the Atlantic Community — now
expanded to include Japan — relevant to a world that little resembled
that of the late 1940s.29 America wanted both to assert its interests
and to remain a European power — no easy task, even before the
end of the Cold War.
Americans not only solicited European help; they received European
goods and ideas. The modern home provides one example. Before and
after World War I, America pioneered the discipline of home econom-
ics and the productions of household technology, but Europeans did
more to advance the design of the modern home as evidenced by the
Bauhaus, the Frankfurter Kitchen, and the functional furniture and
apartments displayed at the 1930 Stockholm exhibition. International
modernism was a transatlantic project but one which always had
distinctive national inflections. Initially, Europe led the way until
many of its proponents were forced into exile due to Nazism’s and
Stalinism’s hostility to that architectural vision. When Americans
embraced modernism and developed large, modern, appliance-filled
kitchens for postwar suburban homes, they claimed these as proudly
and exclusively American. The State Department and Marshall Plan
exhibited modern kitchens and homes in postwar Europe, describing
 Reimagining the Émigrés and Postwar Transcending the Atlantic
Introduction Transatlantic World America World

them as a distinctively American invention to which, however,

Europeans could aspire.30 The transatlantic crossings that went into
these “American” products and the values underlying them were
erased. Europeans, however, were in touch with the national and
pan-European roots of modernism, and the kitchens and homes
they built in the first postwar decades looked less like the American 32 Frieden, Global Capitalism.
models offered than the pioneering European designs of the prewar
33 Thomas H. Klier, “From
decades. In 1959, in Moscow Soviet Premier Khrushchev and US Tail Fins to Hybrids: How
Vice-President Nixon held their famous debate about the respec- Detroit Lost Its Dominance
of the U.S. Auto Market,”
tive merits of American and Soviet household consumer durables in Economic Perspectives 33,
no. 2 (2009): 2-17. See
front of models of extravagant American kitchens. As Ruth Oldenziel
also, Bernhard Rieger,
and Karin Zachmann have argued, it was not America that won the The People’s Car: A Global
History of the Volkswagen
famous Kitchen Debate; rather, it was Sweden along with other Euro- Beetle (Cambridge, 2013),
pean countries that produced austere functionalist modern kitchens31 188-232.

34 The Transatlantic Perspec-

The first postwar decades, like the interwar ones, were an era of tives project at the GHI
diminished economic globalization in comparison to the period in Washington DC (www.
transtalanticperspectives.
before 1914 and after the 1970s.32 But transatlantic trade did increase org) is doing innovative
and not all of it consisted of exports from the United States to Europe. work studying the role
of European migrants in
Take cars, for example. The Big Three automakers — Ford, GM, and transatlantic exchange
Chrysler — dominated the American market until the mid-1950s, with processes during the mid-
twentieth century. Corinna
foreign cars accounting for only 1 percent of sales. By 1959, 10 percent Ludwig is writing a dis-
of cars sold were foreign, with Volkswagen leading the way but many sertation on Volkswagen
and other German mul-
other European manufacturers represented. A decade later, 15 percent tinationals in the United
were, and for the first time the United States imported more cars States, and Jan Logemann
is reconstructing transfers
than it exported. Moreover, it was the popularity of the VW Beatle in consumer marketing
and design through Euro-
that pushed American manufacturers to develop their own economy
pean émigrés. Jan Loge-
cars.33 Much more work needs to be done to explore which European mann, “European Imports?
European Immigrants and
consumer goods, foods, furniture, and clothing styles were popular the Transformation of
among whom and how they shaped American tastes and gained a American Consumer Cul-
ture from the 1920s to the
presence in everyday life.34 Did Americans greet these imports as 1960s,” Bulletin of the Ger-
harbingers of growing cosmopolitanism and Europeanization or as a man Historical Institute 52
(Spring 2013): 113-33.
threatening intrusion, as they later did Japanese imports? Or did they See also Per H. Hansen,
“Networks, Narratives,
and New Markets: The
Rise and Decline of Danish
Modern Furniture Design,
30 Cordula Grewe, ed., Consumption as Propa- 31 Ruth Oldenziel and Karin 1930-1970,” Business
“From Manhattan to ganda in Marshall Plan Zachmann, “Kitchens History Review 80 (Autumn
Mainhattan: Architecture Germany,” Journal of Con- as Technology and Poli- 2006): 449-83; Veronique
and Style as Transatlantic temporary History 40, no. 2 tics: An Introduction,” in Poulliard, “Design Piracy
Dialogue, 1920–1970,” (2005): 261-88; David Cold War Kitchen: Amer- in the Fashion Industries
GHI Bulletin Supplement 2 Crowley and Jane Pavitt, icanization, Technology, of Paris and New York in
(2005). Greg Castillo, eds., Cold War Modern: and European Users, ed. the Interwar Years,” Busi-
“Domesticating the Design 1945-1970 (Lon- Oldenziel and Zachmann ness History Review 85,
Cold War: Household don, 2008). (Cambridge, 2009), 8. no. 2 (2011): 319-44.

NOLAN | RETHINKING 31

35 Before World War I, Ameri-
cans seemed confident about
their ability to borrow freely
from abroad without their
essential identity being
thereby transformed. Henry
James, for example, noted,
“We can deal freely with
forms of civilization not our
own, can pick and choose
and assimilate and in short
(aesthetically, etc.,) claim our
property wherever we find
it.” Selected Letters of Henry
James, ed. Leon Edel (New
York, 1999), 23. See also
Kristin Hoganson, Consumers’
Imperium: The Global
Production of American Domes-
ticity, 1865-1920 (Raleigh,
NC, 2007).
36 David Armitage, “Three Con-
cepts of Atlantic History,” in
The British Atlantic World,
1500-1800, ed. David
Armitage and Michael
J. Braddick (New York, 2002),
11-27, quote 16.
37 Among those who have pio-
neered new and more capa-
cious transatlantic visions are
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlan-
tic: Modernity and Double
Consciousness (Cambridge,
MA, 1993); and Andrew Zim-
merman, Alabama in Africa:
Booker T. Washington, The
German Empire and the Glo-
balization of the New South
(Princeton, 2010).
32 GHI BULLETIN SUPPLEMENT 10 (2014)
assume that Americans could take what they wanted from Europe
and the world without being changed in the process?35
Intra-European Circuits
Historians of transatlantic exchanges and networks in the American
Century, or more accurately, quarter century, have focused almost
exclusively on the North Atlantic. This is hardly surprising given
American hegemony coming out of World War II. To be sure, U.S.
global interests are acknowledged, even though the primacy of Euro-
pean ones are usually assumed, and Western European integration
is discussed, although mainly in terms of whether Americans or
Europeans were most responsible and whether it fostered or fractured
transatlantic connections. Historians have concentrated on develop-
ing more nuanced understandings of the reception of American ideas,
products, policies, and practices, and, as this collection shows, are
beginning to explore what flowed from Europe to the United States
in these decades. These are welcome developments, but how else
might transatlantic relations be approached? David Armitage has
suggested that historians of the early modern Atlantic world have
been guided by three conceptual approaches — a transatlantic one
that compares different areas, a circum-Atlantic one that focuses on
the Atlantic itself as “a particular zone of exchange and interchange,
circulation and transmission,” and a cis-Atlantic history that situ-
ates particular places and institutions within their broader Atlantic
context.36 Twentieth-century historians can fruitfully borrow from all
three but also need to move beyond them. At issue is not only how
to study the Atlantic world, but equally, what other networks and
circuits of exchange and what other areas of the globe it should be
studied in relation to.37 Two would be particularly useful for evaluat-
ing the importance of transatlantic relations in comparison to other
interests, exchanges, and networks in the first Cold War decades
and for understanding the distinctive if not conflicting interests of
different parts of the Atlantic Community: exchanges and networks
within Europe, including across the Iron Curtain, and relations with
the Third World.
In the U.S. Cold War geographic imaginary, Europe ended where
Soviet control began. Wendell Willkie’s wartime vision of one world
had been replaced by the tripartite division among the first or free
world, dominated by the United States and its Atlantic Allies, a sec-
ond enslaved communist world that had to be contained if not rolled
 Reimagining the Émigrés and Postwar Transcending the Atlantic
Introduction Transatlantic World America World

back, and a Third World over whose loyalty the two superpowers
would compete.38 For Americans, Europe and the Western European
states of the Atlantic Community were identical, and severing trade,
travel, and cultural exchanges with the Soviet Union and the coun-
tries of East Central Europe was a useful Cold War weapon and, in
the age of McCarthyism, politically expedient. Western Europeans
carried different mental maps, in which the socialist east was still
a part of Europe, even if an internal other of a different sort than in
earlier centuries.39 One might detest the ruling regimes but did not
wish to cut that part of Europe off completely — Adenauer’s Germany
being the main exception.

These different geographic imaginaries led to repeated conflicts about

relations between Western and Eastern Europe. In the 1950s, for
example, there were bitter disagreements about the so-called COCOM
(Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls) list of
goods that the U.S. government prohibited from being sold to com-
munist countries. These covered 30 to 50 percent of all commodities
in international trade. German industrialists and British politicians
complained vociferously over these restrictions, agreeing with Le
Monde that “The economies of Eastern and Western Europe needed
one another…” Western European states eventually capitulated for
fear of losing American aid. 40 Nonetheless, disputes over whether
political isolation or economic trade and investment was the proper
way to deal with communist countries resurfaced with Willy Brandt’s
Ostpolitik and again with the Conference for Cooperation and Security
in Europe’s negotiations that led to the 1975 Helsinki Accord. They 38 Ronald Steel, “How
erupted as well over nuclear weapons, especially Euro missiles in the Europe Became Atlantic:
Walter Lippmann and the
late 1970s. Geography is not destiny, but geographical proximity and New Geography of the
long-standing economic and cultural ties created different interests Atlantic Community,” in
Defining the Atlantic Com-
vis-à-vis Eastern Europe on the two sides of the Atlantic. munity: Culture, Intellec-
tuals and Policies in the
They also created different circuits of exchange. The COCOM restric- mid-twentieth Century, ed.
Marco Marino (New York,
tions failed to weaken the Soviet economy substantially and ironically 2010), 13-27.
enabled the USSR to integrate Eastern European economies more
39 Larry Wolff, Inventing
closely within the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. In the Eastern Europe: The Map of
Civilization on the Mind of
1960s, Western Europe traded goods, made investments, and lent
the Enlightenment (Stan-
money to Eastern Europe, and these exchanges were to increase ford, CA, 1994).
significantly in the 1970s. Fiat built an automobile factory in Togliat- 40 Gunnar Adler-Karlsson,
tigrad in the Soviet Union in 1970, for example, and Western Euro- Western Economic Warfare
1947-67: A Case Study in
pean countries marketed some of their least expensive household Foreign Economic Policy
consumer durables in Eastern Europe. While the Soviet Union did not (Stockholm, 1968.)

NOLAN | RETHINKING 33

41 Stephen Kotkin, “Kiss of
Debt: The East Bloc Goes
Borrowing,” The Shock of the
Global, ed. Niall Ferguson,
Charles S. Maier, Erez
Manela, and Daniel J. Sargent
(Cambridge, MA, 2010), 80-93.
42 David Crowley, “Thaw Mod-
ern: Design in Eastern Europe
after 1956,” in Cold War
Modern, ed. Crowley and
Pavitt, 148-49.
43 Nolan, Transatlantic Century,
310-13.
34 GHI BULLETIN SUPPLEMENT 10 (2014)
borrow money, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and the GDR did
steadily from the late 1960s on in order to procure Western technol-
ogy but above all to meet the growing demand for consumer goods.
Western Europe was the primary source of these products and funds,
not the United States, which preferred to loan to Latin America and
viewed such intra-European exchanges with ambivalence.41 Officials
and citizens of the GDR viewed the FRG as the West with whom it
competed, and elsewhere in East Central Europe, Scandinavia and
the Ulm Institute for Design shaped socialist modern design. The
Soviets looked to the Baltic States, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the
GDR as a “West” that was not only friendlier but easier to imagine
emulating, for consumer goods there were smaller, less expensive,
and less ostentatious than American ones.42
Some trade moved the other way. Eastern European consumer goods
failed to gain access to Western European markets — who after all
would buy a Trabant or a Yugo, when owning a Fiat or a VW was pos-
sible? From the early 1960s on, however, the Soviet Union exported
oil to countries such as Austria, Sweden, Italy, and Greece, and by the
1980s was sending natural gas to West Germany, despite U.S. opposi-
tion to its export, and Germany helped construct a pipeline. President
Reagan imposed economic sanctions on Poland in the wake of the
1981 declaration of martial law; while his Western European allies
condemned Jaruzelski, they refused to cut economic ties — Margaret
Thatcher included. Different ideas about the place of the Soviet bloc
in an imagined Europe and about the use of economic weapons in
the Cold War were a repeated source of tension within the Atlantic
Community, and from the 1970s on the United States was ever less
able to impose its preferred solutions.43
More important than exchanges across the increasingly permeable
Iron Curtain were those within the European Community (EC) (whose
initial six members grew to nine by the early 1970s and to twelve
before the post 1989 eastward expansion pushed membership to 27),
and between the EC and other non-communist European countries.
The creation of a common market by the late 1950s fostered intra-
European trade much more than its transatlantic counterpart. In
1955, the six founding EC members sent 32 percent of their exports
to other EC countries and 59 percent overall to Western Europe; by
1970 the proportion of exports to EC members was 49 percent and
to Western Europe 69 percent. Western Europe, in turn, sent 28
percent of its exports to the EC six in 1955, but 41 percent in 1970. In
 Reimagining the Émigrés and Postwar Transcending the Atlantic
Introduction Transatlantic World America World

1955, over half of Western European exports were within the region;
by 1960 two-thirds were.44 In the late 1950s, Western European
countries entered a new phase of mass consumption with cars, TVs,
and especially household consumer durables becoming a common
feature of everyday life. These were not made in the United States,
whose designs were deemed too large, streamlined, and expensive,
but rather by domestic manufacturers or other European produc-
ers. Bosch, Siemens, and AEG exported appliances across Western
Europe, Italy’s Vespa scooters were popular in many countries, and
Scandinavian design circulated widely. These intra-European circuits
of goods and models of modern housing were more important than
transatlantic ones.45 They contributed to the emergence of a European
version of modernity with distinctive varieties of capitalism, social
policy, underlying social values, and patterns of consumption. Euro-
pean identity was and may well still be thin, economic, and pragmatic
or rational, rather than robust, multifaceted, and emotional, but
beginning in the 1960s European ways of living came to resemble
one another more than they did American ones.

Atlantic Community and the Third World

Even though U.S. leaders have insisted that America has global
interests and responsibilities while Europe has only regional ones,
concern with the global economic and political order, in fact, occupied
European states as much as the United States in the first postwar
44 Barry Eichengreen, The
decades.46 The postwar settlements in Europe and Japan were negoti- European Economy since
1945: Coordinated Capi-
ated separately and America controlled the latter, yet France, Britain, talism and Beyond (Prince-
and the Netherlands, who all had colonies in East and Southeast ton, 2008), 178.

Asia, were vitally interested in arrangements there.47 Thereafter, 45 Nolan, Transatlantic

decolonization, development, and the impact of the Third World on Century, 259-62.

the security and economic prosperity of the Atlantic Community were 46 Daniel Moeckli, “Asserting
issues that concerned individual states and prompted contention as Europe’s Distinct Identity:
The EC Nine and Kiss-
much as cooperation across the Atlantic. inger’s Year of Europe,”
in Strained Alliance, ed.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s early wartime condemnation of colonial- Schulz and Schwartz,
195-220.
ism as immoral and outdated softened considerably by 1945, as the
United States sought to gain trusteeships over key Pacific Islands, 47 Yuichi Hosoya, “The
Atlantic Community and
on the one hand, and to promote the recovery of European colonial the Restoration of the
powers and cultivate their friendship. American policy proved to be Global Balance of Power:
The Western Alliance,
inconsistent in practice as well as in principal. Officials criticized Japan and the Cold War,”
in Defining the Atlantic
colonialism but relegated decolonization to a distant future, thereby
Community, ed. Marino,
alienating both European powers and national liberation movements. 174-90.

NOLAN | RETHINKING 35

48 William Roger Louis and
Ronald Robinson, “The
Imperialism of Decoloniza-
tion,” Journal of Imperial and
Commonwealth History 22,
no. 3 (1994): 462-511; John
Kent, “The United States and
the Decolonization of Black
Africa, 1945-63,” in The United
States and Decolonization,
ed. David Ryan and Victor
Pungong, 169-73; Marilyn B.
Young, The Vietnam Wars:
1945-1990 (New York,
1991), 2-36. The best col-
lection on the interactions of
Western Europeans, Soviets,
and Americans around Suez
is William R. Louis and Roger
Owen, eds., Suez 1956: The
Crisis and Its Consequences
(New York, 1989).
49 Nick Cullather, “Damming
Afghanistan: Modernization
in a Buffer State,” Journal of
American History 89, no. 2
(Sept. 2002): 512-37; Odd
Arne Westad, The Global Cold
War: Third World Interven-
tions and the Making of Our
Time (Cambridge, 2005).
50 Young-Sun Hong, The Global
Humanitarian War: Cold-War
Germany and the Third World
(Cambridge, 2015 [forth-
coming]).
51 For an attempt at a more
comprehensive history of
development, see Piero
Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions:
Havana, Washington and
Africa (Raleigh, NC, 2002).
See also David C. Engerman
and Corinna R. Unger, “Intro-
duction: Towards a Global
History of Modernization,”
Diplomatic History 33, no. 3
(June 2009): 375-85; and the
articles in their special issue.
36 GHI BULLETIN SUPPLEMENT 10 (2014)
The United States forced the Dutch to leave Indonesia but allowed
France to return to Indochina and pressured neither the French, the
British, the Belgians, nor the Portuguese to give up their vast African
holdings. The United States refused to back Britain and France in the
1956 Suez crisis to the dismay of both, but it quickly took on its own
neocolonial role, proclaiming the Eisenhower Doctrine to support
democratic states in the Middle East — of which there were few — and
sending troops to Lebanon. In both the Korean and Vietnam Wars,
the United States pressured its Western European allies to support
its military endeavors, at the very least with money. The responses,
disappointing to the Americans, were sources of ongoing transatlan-
tic tensions. In short, transatlantic diplomatic, military, and economic
relations were constantly triangulated in and through a Third World
undergoing dramatic changes.48
At issue was not merely political subordination or independence
but also economic development. Modernization and development
were first discussed in relationship to postwar Europe, especially
Italy — although reconstruction was usually the preferred term —
then in terms of Latin America from the late 1940s and more glob-
ally by the 1960s. U.S. social scientists, along with Latin American
ones, pioneered modernization theory, but Europeans, East and
West, launched development projects from the mid-1950s on. The
Soviets under Khrushchev lent money to Egypt to help Nasser build
the Aswan High Dam once the Americans pulled out and built
infrastructure and factories as well as educational institutions in
Afghanistan at the same time the United States was constructing
vast irrigation projects in other parts of that nation. India took aid
from both superpowers but tried to steer a nonaligned course.49 In
her forthcoming book, Young-sun Hong reconstructs the complex
involvement of East and West Germany in development policies in
the Third World in the 1950s and 1960s. Each Germany competed
with the other for influence and diplomatic recognition by devel-
oping public health programs in Vietnam, Korea, and Tanzania.
Each sought to promote its particular ideology about democratic
or socialist public health and to train health workers to practice
it.50 Other states in Western and Eastern Europe established their
own development programs as well as supporting UN ones. Each
promoted national interests and visions and joined in larger Cold
War ones. We know too little about how much conflict over devel-
opment there was — not between blocs where the competition was
open and evident to all — but within them.51
 Reimagining the Émigrés and Postwar Transcending the Atlantic
Introduction Transatlantic World America World

Guiliano Garavini’s After Empires suggests that Europe had a distinctive

economic approach to the Third World until the 1980s. Europe’s first
response to decolonization was to turn inward and focus on retaining
ties to former colonies through bilateral arrangements and agreements
such as the Yaoundé Convention between African states and the EEC.
From the late 1960s, European politicians, socialist parties, NGOs, stu-
dents, and the Catholic Church all to varying degrees supported Third
World efforts for new kinds of development aid and a more equitable
global division of resources. The EEC and Western European countries
spearheaded international economic cooperation via the North-South
Dialogue, which met from 1975 to 1977, at a time when both the United
States and the Soviet Union were not interested in a cooperative solu-
tion to the multiple problems of that troubled decade.

In 1975, with encouragement from some Western Europeans, the

G7, supported by the UN Conference on Trade and Development,
proposed a New International Economic Order (NIEO), which laid
out a blueprint for a more equitable division not only of resources
but also of decision-making power in international economic institu-
tions. Although the General Assembly passed it, the United States
opposed it, providing one more source of transatlantic tension. By
the 1980s, however, the cooperation between the EC and UNCTAD
was fraying and the creation of the G7 and imposition of the Wash-
ington Consensus had defeated any hopes for a NIEO. In Garavini’s
assessment, Europe had successfully abandoned its imperial illusions
without finding a meaningful new relationship to the global south.52
Its efforts to do so, however, and the resulting disagreements with
the United States, suggest that relations with the Third World were
as likely to cause divisions within the Atlantic Community as to unite
it against an “other.” As the following essays by Quinn Slobodian
and Christian Albrecht show, neoliberal economists, businessmen,
and politicians from a variety of perspectives worried intensely about
how development or lack thereof in the Third World would rebound
on Europe.53 They seldom agreed on either the nature of the prob-
lem or the desirability of proposed solutions. What historians of the
Atlantic Community need to consider, however, is that these debates
52 Giuliano Garavini, After
were ongoing and central to both transatlantic relations and the self- Empires: European Inte-
gration, Decolonization,
definition of individual states and different political orientations.
and the Challenge from the
Global South, 1957-1986
(Oxford, 2012).
Open Questions
53 See the Slobodian and
Historians of transatlantic relations have often posited two breaks
Albrecht essays in this
in the direction and character of networks and exchanges: the first volume.

NOLAN | RETHINKING 37
 and sharpest is World War II; the second and more contested is the
long 1970s. There is much to be said for each, but both need to be
questioned. As some of the essays that follow suggest, there are many
continuities in the networks and ideas that moved across the Atlantic
before and after 1945, and there were more European influences than
have been assumed. Other authors show that some phenomena that
are held to be markers of rupture, such as neoliberalism, in fact have
deep roots in the interwar era and earlier transatlantic exchanges.
And how do we periodize the Atlantic Community and the global
order? Were they always intertwined by colonialism, decoloniza-
tion, and development? Did Japan’s 1964 membership in the OECD
and its 1970s participation in the Trilateral Commission mark a new
phase? Has the Atlantic Community been superseded by an American
dominated global order or by something else entirely? Rethinking
transatlantic relations in the first Cold War decades raises as many
questions as it answers.

Mary Nolan is a professor of history at New York University. A historian of

Modern Germany, her research now focuses on twentieth-century European-
American relations — economic, political and cultural. She has written widely on
anti-Americanism and Americanization in Europe as well as on American anti-
Europeanism. Recently she published The Transatlantic Century Europe and the
United States, 1890-2010 (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

38 GHI BULLETIN SUPPLEMENT 10 (2014)